SmartAdvocate’s Outlook Plugin Adds Emails as Notes to Cases
SmartAdvocate’s strong relationship with Outlook, Microsoft’s eminent personal information manager, gets even stronger as we introduce our newest feature that allows attaching any email as a Note to a case in SmartAdvocate. As we already learned in previous Blog posts, Outlook’s SmartAdvocate add-in increases the capabilities of Outlook by adding SmartAdvocate’s new related features to the Outlook’s context menus and toolbars.
We all know that part of the day when we need to sort through our hundreds of emails and connect each one of them with their relevant case file – SmartAdvocate changes that tedious experience altogether. With the productive abilities of SmartAdvocate, each email, whether it has an attachment or not, can now be related directly to a case, and we no longer need to slowly go through the exhausting procedure of copying each email’s text and pasting it as a note in different case files. With our Outlook add-on tool, this process becomes seamless.
The magic happens on the Mail Screen of Outlook, by right-clicking any email in the messages panel which opens up the standard Outlook pop-up context menu. Once SmartAdvocate’s Outlook add-on is installed, the “Add to SmartAdvocate as Note” feature at the bottom of the features list will appear.
While clicking on it, a dialog box opens that allows us to choose the case we would like to attach the note to. We can look for the correct case using the following options:
- Directly typing the case number
- Browsing through the last twenty cases accessed
- Going to the list of cases that are associated with you (“My Cases”), that will result in listing all of the cases assigned to you as a user
- Looking through the list of “All Cases”, which will show a listing of all of the firm’s cases, either open or both open and closed
- If the sender’s email is in the system you will see an extra tab – “Sender’s Cases”. This tab will contain cases associated with the sender of the email, making it even easier to find the right case.
The Body of the email, including the From, Sent, To and Subject fields will be presented at the WYSIWYG editor on the right, allowing us to make changes to the email text content, adjust the email’s fonts, change the Type or the Date and, most importantly, set the Priority to either Low, Normal or High.
When we are ready to attach the email to the case, we can now choose to click the “Attach and Close” button that will add the note to the case and will return us to Outlook email’s list. Alternatively, choose “Attach” and keep the dialog box open. Canceling the procedure is very easy by just clicking on the “Close” button, which will reverse and change and will also return us back to Outlook email’s list.
